Moore goes topsy-turvy for Gilbert & Sullivan

By Susan Blood Banner Correspondent

Saturday

Jun 2, 2018 at 9:13 AM

After 30 years, WOMR radio host Brad Moore is switching up his oysters.

His long-running show, “The Psychedelic Oyster,” featuring recordings of The Grateful Dead every other Monday at 9 p.m., will be replaced with a new show, “The Whistling Oyster,” which is something altogether different. In place of the Dead, Moore will now be playing historic D’Oyly Carte Opera Company recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan operattas, from “The Pirates of Penzance” to “The Mikado.” The new show premieres at noon on Sunday, June 3, and will return once a month.

The name of the show was taken from a book by W.S. Gilbert called “The Bab Ballads,” which included “The Precocious Baby,” sung to the air of “The Whistling Oyster.” That bit of insider information is indicative of what’s in store for listeners. Moore is full of knowledge he’s eager to share, and has the music to go with it, including recordings spanning nearly a century.

The earliest are from 1917, when the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company (which Gilbert and Sullivan wrote for), began recording on HMV records. This acoustic series involved singing into a large megaphone, and ran until 1925. The electric series followed, for which they upgraded to microphones, and it lasted until World War II.

Moore has in his collection acoustic series recordings remastered from 78s and electric series recordings remastered from 78s and LPs, as well as mono and stereo series recordings. “Having the acoustic series is rare,” he says, “and a nice asset to the show. Basically, from 1917 through 1979, members of the D’Oyly Carte were making single records of different songs, which I have a lot of.”

Moore says he was introduced to Gilbert and Sullivan’s music by his father, a Harvard alum, who frequently took him to the Agassiz Theatre to see the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players. And, coincidentally, Moore and Gilbert share the same birthday.

If it seems like a stretch, jumping from 30 years of The Grateful Dead to Gilbert and Sullivan, Moore insists there will be parallels between the two shows — both will feature rare recordings and bootlegs, for instance.

“If it’s good, I like it,” he says. “It doesn’t matter when it was made.”